When we went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas Day we had an impossible to pin down problem with the film that prevented us from loving it. No, we weren’t like some critics who claimed that the CGI fest left them feeling cold. Or others who said it was way too long or a total rip-off of Forrest Gump (although that did make us wonder why most great American epics are set in the South…perhaps we enjoy watching normally capable actors struggle to avoid sounding like Foghorn Leghorn). Thankfully, Dan Kois from Vulture has finally given name to the previously impossible to identify slap in the face — the lack of the old-baby man.
“David Fincher delivers the old-man baby the trailer promised, but completely botches it in portraying the old-baby man that Brad Pitt should’ve become at the end of the movie…Instead of continuing the special-effects magic, Fincher just casts a 12-year-old who sort of looks like Brad Pitt, and then some baby with blondish hair. Which is, of course, a total cop-out. By the movie’s own logic, elderly Benjamin Button wouldn’t be a baby-size baby; after all, he wasn’t born an old-man-size old man! (Unlike, by the way, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original short story, in which Benjamin is freakishly born full-size, bearded, and talking.) We were totally looking forward to seeing a creepy old-baby man crawling around. Could you imagine an elderly Cate Blanchett trying to rock and cuddle a five-foot-tall baby? It might have made the movie’s dead-baby ending bizarre and awesome instead of mawkish and manipulative!”
Sadly, ’tis true Fincher. You copped out. Kois points to budget issues as the reason you failed to deliver us the elder goods viewers were craving, but we’ve got to protest — how much could throwing a baby’s head on Leslie Jordan’s body cost?
Did anyone else feel robbed by the film’s Gerber Baby ending?
Comments (2)
On a purely logical-technical point, you are correct: Button should have ended his days as an adult sized baby. However, that would have destroyed the core of the movie, which is at heart a fable, (unless you really believe reverse aging is possible) in favor of trying to adhere to a logical consistency that is on its face impossible and thus unnecessary.
However, this would have robbed the film of its emotional payoff. Imagine how the very touching scenes of Cate Blanchett's character caring for the ever younger Button would have played if he was an adult sized baby. It would have been more horror show than poignant. One of many points of the film was how Button wanted to spare Blanchett from having to care for him as he retrograded, but that is precisely what she ended up doing, out of unconditional love.
If I were to criticize any aspect of the film, it would not be the "old baby" (see post above). Instead, its flaws were 1) the unnecessary, distracting, and ultimately jarring framing story focusing on a dying Blanchett and her daughter in a New Olreans hospital during the runup to Hurricane Katrina. Given the real life horrors of Katrina, including the awful stories of what happened in New Orleans hospitals, this was offputting, and 2) Button's decision to leave Blanchett when he did to spare her and their daughter his regression to infancy made no sense, since he still had a good 15-20 years of productive adult life ahead at that point in time.
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